Tasks

Notes

I read a lot. This week, I took notes on five non-fiction books,
skimmed another seven books, and read three fiction books (the Artemis
Fowl hardcover books we picked up yesterday). And that's just my
casual reading, not including the research papers I read for my
thesis.

I keep notes on the most interesting books in searchable,
semi-structured text files on my hard disk. The page numbers and
quotations are invaluable when I'm recommending books to people. I
also keep track of when I talk about books and to whom I mention them.
It's all part of

I put the time into doing this because I'm too lazy to reread
everything. The highlights help me review. =)

Today I tried using a scanner to pull in pages. tesseract-ocr is
surprisingly accurate. With optical character recognition under Linux,
I might be able to more easily capture excerpts. I still have to edit
the results and summarize the book, but it would be nice not to have
to type the short paragraphs that I copy into my digital commonplace book. My notes aren't posted online and I don't pull everything in, so I shouldn't have problems with copyright... =)

Happy girl. Much reading. Much learned, too. Best book find of the
week was "First, Break All the Rules." I owe that one to Ian Garmaise,
who tipped me off about Marcus Buckingham. "Never Bet the Farm" also
yielded useful insights on risk-taking, and "How to Sell a Lobster"
shared lots of marketing tricks. Good stuff.

I also read a lot about work-life balance. "Creating a Life:
Professional Women and the Quest for Children" had better statistics
on high-achieving women and relationships than I had previously
encountered, and actually paints a fairly positive picture of women
who decide early. "Flex Appeal" talked about flexible work such as
entrepreneurship, compressed work-weeks, part-time work, and
job-sharing. It had practical advice for negotiating such arrangements
and a good visioning exercise. "Three-ring Circus" by D.C. Jefferson
and R. Welch had lots of anecdotes about balance. Stuff to keep in
mind for several years down the line, although it's good to plan
ahead.

I recommended "First, Break All the Rules" to four people and talked
about "The Tipping Point" with one person. "How to Sell a Lobster"
looks like it has direct applications to some of my projects.

I've got a constant stream of books coming in via the library. Life is
good!

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Page: 2007.07.07

Updated: 2007-07-0722:14:3622:14:36-0400

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